Faith, Science, Cigarettes, and TV Tea Leaves
My socks only touched the even
number steps. After 14, I landed on the living room carpet in front of
Grandma's ceramic Buddha. He was six
inches tall. I measured him with the
ruler my sister got from the third grade science fair. Buddha smiled across the
room at Grandma snoring in her brown leather chair, with his legs crossed
inside-out on top of our broken TV.
Liz squatted on the floor with our
brother's rubber ball that had pimples on it. She set it in different places
around the room, ob-serv-ing like a real scientist. Besides the ball, she had tried a lemon drop,
and a bobbin from Grandma's sewing machine in her experiment that morning.
"Liz, doncha think Grandma
looks like Buddha?" I asked.
"You're stupid," Liz
said. "He's a man. Grandma's got
hair and boobs."
"Yeah, but when her hair's wet,
she looks bald. And her boobs look like
extra long bellies rollin' over the sides of her big one." Grandma, wet in the sun, flashed into my
head. "Maybe she's his
wife."
"Gods don't have wives."
Liz dribbled the ball.
"What about Zeus? He's married, and he's king of all the
gods."
"People don't believe in that
anymore," Liz said. "Those
were just stories made up before people got smarter." She steadied the ball on the TV. It rolled to the left and circled a
little. I didn't let on I agreed with
Liz's de-duc-tion about pretend gods.
I asked, "Do you think people
rub Buddha's belly for luck the way I like hugging Grandma's? I feel lucky magic when I'm near her
belly."
"You make it sound like some
sort of pot of gold. We're not
Irish. And we don't worship Buddha
either."
Liz chucked the ball into the
kitchen. She made an ob-ser-va-tion of
Buddha, then Grandma. "Grandma's tan does sort of make her look like the
brown statue that got broke." Liz turned back to the TV. "This green one's prettier though."
She rubbed its head.
"See?" I asked. "Green...Irish. Like the Barney Stone. Doncha rub that for good luck too?" Boy, was I proud of my de-duc-tion.
"No," Liz said as she
climbed onto our floor console and stood up, with Buddha between her feet. "You kiss it while you hang over
it." She bent until she was face to
upside-down face with him. Her blonde hair dangled across the TV's screen like
a grass skirt.
Grandma's sleep meditation was over
in one extra loud snort. "Get down
from there and leave that statue alone.
I still can't get the head to stay on the one your brother
broke." She coughed and shifted in
her chair. The lady smell that stayed in
the leather of the chair, even when she stood up, got stronger.
"I did it!" Liz said with
her arms up. She jumped off the TV. "I kissed the Blarney Buddha's
belly."
Grandma said something real low that
I couldn't hear. She leaned to the right and then to the left. One of her huge crinkly hands disappeared
each time into the big pockets sticking out from the sides of her recliner. With the TV not working, I heard sounds in
the living room I didn't remember hearing before, like Grandma's chair burping
when she moved in it, and the springy squeak when Liz popped onto the
couch. I
bounced on the carpet near the front door. That was where the floor
creaked the loudest.
Liz investigated the rim and sides
of an empty cup on the end table. She
rolled it between her hands, but it dropped onto the coffee table upside down
with a 'clump'. Grandma breathed a noisy
breath and kept digging.
I sat with Liz on the couch next to
Grandm'a recliner. Liz lifted her feet
off the floor and criss-crossed her legs. She asked, "Grandma, can you sit
in a lotus position?"
Wiggling on the couch, I forcing
myself to keep quiet. Now that Liz had
given up on the boring stuff, the fun started.
In my head, I followed her scientific pro-ce-dure. Grandma and Buddha actually were two of the
roundest things in the house.
"What?" Grandma asked.
"You know, on the floor, like
Buddha on his little slab. I don't
believe a real person with a belly can do it."
"How can I do that with only
one leg?" Grandma pulled out a TV
Guide, a red marker, a cone-shaped spool of thread, and a can of 3-IN-ONE oil
from the chairs pockets.
I had forgotten too-about Grandma
needing another leg to sit cross-legged.
Liz rolled her eyes from the leg
that wasn't there to the ceiling, and kept them there for a few seconds. Then she asked, "Can you try it anyway,
please? I want to also see which
direction your body rolls."
"What for?" Grandma pull out a deck of cards and an empty
tic tac dispenser, and piled them on a TV table.
"I'm trying to figure out how
level the house is. Round stuff works
the best," Liz replied.
I stopped fidgeting. Excitement
bubbled inside me to see if Grandma would do it. Liz was her favorite because she was named
after Grandma. Maybe Grandma would try
since Liz asked her to do it.
"If I got on that floor, I'd
never get up. Now run upstairs and see
if my cigarettes are in the bathroom."
Yep, Liz was her favorite. She
always asks her to get the cigarettes.
"I'll get 'em." I didn't give Liz a chance to beat me to
them.
I came back, plunking myself down
every step, holding the gold pack of Marlboros.
"Here you go,"
I said, handing it to Grandma and backing away.
Grandma flipped open the book of
matches that was tucked under the cellophane around the cigarettes. "Damn it to hell."
My voice jumped: "What's the
matter?"
"The match book's
empty."
"Do you want me to get another
one from the kitchen?" I froze on
tiptoes, with a hand behind my back.
"No I found one," Grandma
said, picking a bent pack of matches out from the space between the arm of her
recliner and seat cushion. She shook the
cigarettes until one popped out above the rest, then picked it out and shoved
it between her lips.
I turned to leave.
"Wait a minute," Grandma
said from the side of her mouth not clamping down on the cigarette. "Get back here. One's missing."
I swiveled around and handed over
the cigarette. Grandma's acusing eye as
she struck the match alive made me want to cry, but I couldn't in front of Liz,
she'd make fun of me.
"I wasn't going to smoke
it," I said. "Honest. I wanted
it for Buddha."
,
Grandma took the cigarette out
of her mouth. "For what?"
Her question helped me control
myself. "Don't people burn stuff in
the little ash tray that sits in front of Buddha? I figured that, a cigarette could make some
real good ashes for a god. More than
them skimpy ones from those punk sticks."
"You leave my cigarettes alone,
you hear? They're for me."
I slouched into a corner of the
couch.
Liz asked, "Why were they in
the bathroom, Grandma?"
"To help me relax in
there."
"When you're...?" Liz began.
"Shit. Shit.
Shit." Grandma dropped the
lit match, and stomped her foot on it.
"You made me burn myself.
What's with all the questions anyhow?
What do I look like? The Dalai
Lama?"
Liz and I chanted, "No,
Buddha."
"Do you hum and meditate in the
bathroom?" I asked. "Don't you
always say that happiness is a good bowel movement?"
"What?" Grandma's deep scratchy voice came from one
side of her mouth as she finally lit her cigarette. "I just make that up for laughs."
"Buddha must laugh a lot,"
I said. "He's always smiling. He's got no teeth, like you, just a dark
space."
Grandma squinted at the smiling god
across the room, and sighed at the dark screen below him.
The doorbell rang.
"Elizabeth, go get the
door." Grandma readjusted her
dress, burped (not the chair this time), and sent more puffs of her goddessness
into the air.
Mrs. Moores and Ms. Perry, the
neighbors, came into our living room. If
the TV was working, their noisy, silly words would've bumped higher than its
volume.
They handed Grandma a box of
Marlboros and a gold Buddha statue. Liz ran upstairs when they waved at
us.
"Dawn, go put the tea water on
for my worshipers." Grandma laughed.
I slid on purpose across the waxed
kitchen floor, and caught myself at the stove.
It seeped gas because the pilot light would never stay lit. I never got used to the nasty smell, even
though I tried to because it was always there in the kitchen.
The mugs without handles worked good
enough for the neighbors; Grandma's flamingo one for her; a flowered one for
me. I counted out the tea bags. They
made my nose happy.
My bag ripped so easy. The dry brown
stuff was like the tobacco that I emptied from a cigarette box Grandma had
asked me to throw away. How could two
things that looked alike, smell so different?
I served the tea in the living room,
and went back to the kitchen to drink mine.
Liz came down to check on her penicillin experiment.
"Liz, did you ever learn about
tea leaves in Mr. Boykins' science class?"
"What?" Liz asked, closing
the bread box. The four day old bread smelled almost as bad as the fresh gas
from the stove.
I lifted my mug with leaves floating
in the steaming water and put it under Liz's nose. "We can read them like
Aunt Bebe used to. Do you want me to make you some tea?"
"I'll fix it myself."
The dark nasty pieces stuck to my
tongue. Liz hy-poth-e-sized that if we waited, all the leaves would sink to the
bottom.
The adults still talked and laughed
in the other room. Brown Buddha smiled
from the counter above a ring of drying glue around his thick neck. My
con-clu-sion: finding pictures in the soggy brown mess at the bottom of our
mugs turned a boring Saturday into mystical, scientific fun.
